How to Travel With Your Partner for a Year (and Stay Together)

Yes, it is possible to travel the world with your significant other without ruining your relationship. Take it from Traveler contributing editor Ashlea Halpern, who spent an entire year globetrotting with her boyfriend.

When people learn that my boyfriend and I recently returned from a yearlong tour of Asia and Australia, they ask us the same three questions: (1.) What was your favorite place? (2.) How did you afford it? and (3.) How have you not killed each other?

Our answers are the same every time: "Too many to name." "We saved and freelanced." "It’s complicated."

Andy and I have been dating 14 years. We met at the student newspaper in college, where he was the pop music critic and I was his editor. (Scandalous, I know.) We’ve since toured 25 countries together, but travel wasn’t something we always saw eye-to-eye on. I moved a lot as a kid and traveled with my family around the U.S., Caribbean, New Zealand, and Australia. I have always loved the smell of airports, because it means you’re going somewhere. Andy, on the other hand, grew up in Buffalo, New York. To him, “traveling” meant driving to Toronto for a Blue Jays game.

The travel lifestyle was something we eased into. When we were young and broke, we took little trips—a long weekend in Montreal or Cape May, always in the dead of winter, when prices were slashed because nobody sane wanted to be there. Over the years, vacations became my preferred way to celebrate birthdays and holidays, because it was something we could experience together. You should’ve seen the look on Andy's face when I woke him up at 3 a.m., bags packed and a taxi waiting downstairs, for a surprise trip to Colombia. Secret trips to Hawaii, Portland, Berlin, Paris, Prague, and Tokyo followed. Andy enjoyed these places in person, but never pined for them in the abstract. I was the fanatical one; he was just a good sport.

So when I approached him about traveling long-term, I started small. Just six weeks, I said. It’ll be great, I said.

I’m nothing if not persuasive: Six weeks became two months became six months became a year. And I was right: It was great. But it wasn’t always a cakewalk. I uttered the phrase “If you can’t hack it, go home” more times than I care to remember—and certainly punctuated with saltier language. But we survived, and in many ways, strengthened our relationship because of it.
In fact, I’d say we’ve gotten pretty good at this whole not-murdering-one-another-while-traveling thing. So much so that we’re actually taking off again in just a few weeks—this time for a nine-month road trip across America, our two chihuahuas in tow. Here are our tips to making it work.

Recognize each other’s strengths

Andy is terrible at macro-planning but terrific at micro-research. So we have an arrangement: It’s on me to decide where we’re going (India, say), how long we’ll be there (5.5 weeks), how we’re getting around (flights, trains, private drivers, etc.), what areas we’re covering (Punjab, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Kerala), and where we’ll stay (hotels, Airbnbs, homestays). I dummy up an outline, then hand it off to Andy to drill down on specific points—the best mutton kebabs in Old Delhi or a must-see art gallery in Fort Kochi. That’s not to say he never finds us a good hotel or I don’t find amazing restaurants, but we work in concert to pool our talents and put together killer itineraries. The divide-and-conquer strategy works in other ways, too. I handle the bills and finances; he does the laundry. I keep in touch with our families so they know we’re not dead; he does the cooking when we eat in. Carving out travel “jobs” based on personal strengths and interests makes both parties feel challenged and fulfilled—and dodges the resentment bullet that comes with one person doing everything.

Photo by Ashlea Halpern

Andy and Ashlea's survival tip: Do stupid things to make each other laugh.

It’s okay to push a little, but know your boundaries

The point of travel is to see the world and get outside your comfort zone. Do things you wouldn’t normally do. Live a little. But if you’re traveling with someone whose zone is smaller than your own, those differences can be divisive. It is important to recognize here, however, that everyone has their issues. Andy is afraid of heights, but I am a picky eater. My hangup stops Andy from ordering the omakase at a renowned sushi restaurant or going all-in on that pig’s head soup. His hangup keeps us off mountaintops, thrill rides, and the glass-bottomed floors of skyscraper observatories. In our worst moments, we ridicule and attack one another’s fears. At our best, we make concessions in order to reach a compromise. We won’t do the omakase, but I’ll try the mackerel appetizer. Andy won’t hike down a perilously steep cliff to a black lava beach, but he’ll wait patiently in the rental car, book in hand, while I do. Do I sometimes wish Andy was one of those balls-to-the-wall, motorcycle-driving, Red Bull-chugging, base-jumping extremists with a GoPro strapped to his head? Sure. But I also appreciate that his overly cautious nature has likely kept us out of a lot of trouble over the years.

Establish a routine

Exhaustion is the single greatest foe of the long-term traveler. When you’re not on the actual move, you’re busy planning the next one. Research and booking becomes a full-time job. The lack of stability can be unsettling for a creature of habit with homebody tendencies (read: Andy). What helped was establishing a routine, however small, and sticking to it. Although we'd wake up in a new bed every couple of mornings, Andy would rise slowly; make himself a nice coffee; and then sit down and read The New York Times on his iPad. I’m more of a go-go-go type of person: wake up, shower, and get a move on the day. C'mon, we’ve got things to do! People to see! A city to conquer! It took me months to understand and accept that Andy’s routine was what kept him grounded—and willing to power through the days where all he really wanted to do was fly home and rest.

Get to the root of the problem

“You guys never fight?!” people sometimes ask me, rather incredulously. Oh, we fight. Boy, do we fight! But we’ve also been doing this long enough to know that if we can suppress our rage for one hot second and calmly ask, “What is this fight really about?,” 99 percent of the time we realize it has nothing to do with us and everything to do with stress caused by external factors. Maybe we haven’t slept in 48 hours because it took six trains, two flights, and a miserable layover to get where we’re going. Maybe the hotel is a nightmare or someone was rude to us at the corner market. Point is, if you can isolate and identify the thing that is making everyone cranky, you can fix it. Also: Time outs work wonders. We’ve stopped mid-fight and agreed to an hour of silence. Andy puts on headphones and I lose myself on Facebook until we both agree to be civil.

Talk to other people

Andy and I never run out of things to talk about, because we are interested in many of the same things (books, art, film, politics, etc.). But there comes a time in every LTR couple’s life when all you want to do is talk to someone other than your partner. This is especially true when you’re spending every waking minute together, without friends or family or work colleagues to divert your attention. The human need to socialize became painfully acute for us when traveling in countries where English was not the primary language. Try as we might, our conversations only went so deep when conducted via Google Translate. Still, we put ourselves out there. Instead of talking to each other for the 9,285th time at a bar in Hanoi, we engaged the bartender. We struck up a conversation with a shy Australian couple staying at our hotel in Penang. We met up with friends passing through town on business, wrote postcards, and even wrote letters to ourselves. Talk is good.

In times of trouble, stand united

When you-know-what hits the fan, rule No. 1 is teamwork. I screwed up an Airbnb reservation in Shanghai early in our trip, and we overstayed our booking by half a day. The host called my phone repeatedly to tell us we needed to clear out ASAP because a new guest was arriving, but I hadn’t gotten the messages. When he finally got through, we had less than half an hour to get back to the apartment, pack up our things, and get out. This would’ve been a really good time to get in a grand fight—Andy attacking me for being an idiot, and me flipping my wig because we were now effectively homeless. But we didn’t. Instead, we found us a park bench and troubleshot the situation, securing a new place within the hour. When it's just the two of you against the world, you have to form a united front.

Do stupid things to make each other laugh

This is the most important thing. There is no shortage of opportunities to look stupid when you travel. Take advantage of these. Spot a rack of ridiculous sunglasses in a Japanese superstore? Try them all on. Pass a photo booth designed for tweens at a mall in Seoul? Take goofy pictures. Notice a place to do cheap karaoke in Surabaya, Indonesia? Belt it out with abandon. Andy and I have a million stories like these from our travels, and I’m grateful for every one of them. It reminds me how much fun we’ve had together—and we’re only 14 years into this. There's a whole world out there and we're just getting started.